"We're all in the same boat, and we'll sail away together.

It's only fitting that before the series ended, Thriller got in a story
that paid tribute to one of Boris Karloff's seminal film roles, and one
of my favorites, that of Cabman Gray in 1945's "The Body Snatcher".
That might have been his best characterization ever, notwithstanding
his iconic achievements as Frankenstein and The Mummy. Karloff doesn't
appear in this episode, serving only in his regular duty as host of the
show, but no Karloff fan can miss the connection.

The villains of the piece here are a couple of body snatchers, actually
murderers going by Grant and Paterson. By now, I've probably seen John
Anderson more than any other actor in a whole slew of films, usually
Westerns, in which he always does a credible job. His partner in crime
was certainly a surprise for me to see here, George Kennedy as a
hunchback sort of a dimwit who did most of the dirty work. With no
scruples at all, this pair killed for convenience and money, and
allowed their greed to command increasing tribute for the bodies they
provided to anatomy professor Dr. Marcus Graham (Carl Benton Reid).

Now I can't imagine that the demand for cadavers could have been so
great that there would have been more than a couple of entrepreneurs
like Grant and Paterson operating on behalf of a local academy, but
there you'd be wrong. That's actually what provided the twist in this
morbid little tale as the rest of the body snatcher guild brought down
Grant before he could give them all a bad name. Which made me wonder,
how much is a body snatcher's body worth?

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:

The Murderers

John Anderson & George Kennedy play Jacob Grant & John Paterson, two
murderous body snatchers in Victorian England who are not above
murdering any "innocent bystanders" when regular grave robbing dries
up. They sell the bodies to a medical doctor who needs them for his
experiments in class, but the morality of subverting the law by
committing these illegal acts is much debated, as fate catches up with
both Grant & Paterson... Oddly ineffectual re-telling of the familiar
true life story of Burke & Hare has all the right ingredients but still
comes out flat. Watch "The Body Snatcher"(1945) instead, or even "Night
Gallery", which did a better version of this story called 'Deliveries
In The Rear'.

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Weak Body Snatcher Stuff

This involves a subculture of Victorian England. Apparently, there was
practically a body snatcher's union. They dug up graves and stole the
dead to be passed on to medical schools for dissection. However, the
bodies were supposed to be dead by violence or natural causes. A couple
of really bad dudes do their own killing and then sell the bodies. We
are witness to some of the murders. A young man and his disinherited
wife find refuge in the home of one of these guys. He is ugly and
abusive and has a mentally handicapped partner. The young man is
looking for work but times are tough and even when he finds out what
these guys are doing, he wants to look the other way. When it comes to
self preservation, the young woman is one of the stupidest characters
I've ever seen. A really weak episode of Thriller.

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7 out of 18 people found the following review useful:

Burke and Hare with John Anderson and George Kennedy

An extremely weak entry (no.65, possibly produced by Hubbell Robinson
rather than regular producer Willam Frye), this is merely an ultra low
budget take on the 19th century story of Burke and Hare, who murdered
derelicts and prostitutes and sold their corpses to the medical academy
of Doctor Knox (Boris Karloff himself mined this territory in 1945's
superb "The Body Snatcher"). Carl Benton Reid plays the doctor (here
named Marcus Graham), while the killers are called Jacob Grant (John
Anderson) and John Paterson (George Kennedy). Anderson, perhaps best
known as the "high pressured" car salesman in 1960's "Psycho," has the
showy part, while Kennedy is a one-dimensional disappointment as the
dimwitted accomplice. The young hero is played by Steve Terrell (1957's
"Invasion of the Saucer Men"), Diki Lerner makes his second memorable
appearance on THRILLER (the first was the dummy Hans in episode 41 "The
Weird Tailor"), and there is an unbilled silent bit from Harry Wilson,
former stand-in for Wallace Beery (and previously seen as a wax figure
in "Waxworks"), perhaps best known to genre buffs as the title creature
in 1958's "Frankenstein's Daughter." In 1964, THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR
had equally mediocre results with their take on Burke and Hare, "The
McGregor Affair."